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NASM Public License Not GPL-compatible?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the 101010101 dept.

Palisade writes "NASM (The Netwide Assembler) is an open source assembler that can generate code for many platforms/operating systems and is portable to many operating systems. There have been debates in the past over the NASM licence to which NASM itself and all code contributed to the NASM effort is licensed under. The original authors created a license which claims to be compatible with the GPL [?] , but which requires unusual restrictions making it incompatible. For developers to continue developing on NASM would mean they would be contributing to a "black hole". A full synopsis can be found on the NASM website at SourceForge." Update: 09/05 04:57 PM by S :It seems the problem is resolved.

2 of 108 comments (clear)

  1. Licensing by Datafage · · Score: 5
    The whole attitude of much of the open source movement gets to me. The use of the term "black hole" to refer to code not under the GPL is troubling. Other licenses have valid uses, and it should be up to the author which to use. If a person is only willing to code under the GPL, then he is as nonsensical as a person who refuses to drive anything except a Ford Explorer. You're using their compiler; they have the right to say what you can use it for just as much as the GPL says what you can do with code released under it.

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    Nicotine free Amish .sig.

  2. Original NASM Primary Author Speaks by Simon+Tatham · · Score: 5

    I always wanted to appear on Slashdot, but I never thought I'd do it by having years of my life slagged off in a front-page story. <kyle>You bastards!</kyle>

    There's been a lot of dispute as to whether the intent of the GPL clause was to dual-license or to create a strange hybrid thing. I can answer that very simply: it was to dual-license.

    We created the original NASM licence (which didn't even have the GPL clause) back in 1995 when understanding of the issues wasn't widespread like it is now. Nobody seemed to care that it wasn't GPL-compatible at the time - it was free enough for people's purposes.

    After a while, Debian found NASM and packaged it up, and pointed out to us that it would have to go in "non-free" unless we were willing to dual-license with the GPL. We agreed to that, and I sent an email to the Debian package maintainer granting our permission for Debian to distribute their NASM package under the GPL, until such time as we got round to making it explicit in the real licence.

    When we did make it explicit, we clearly didn't do it very well. But the intention has always been to dual-license.

    Therefore, I don't see that there's a serious problem here, at least as far as intentions go. We wanted any user of NASM to have accepted (at least) one of the NASM half of the licence and the GPL. If you want to link NASM code with GPL code, you accept the GPL, and then you have no problem.